Emma slides the window closed, comes back, sits on the stool, pushes her bangs back away from her forehead. The air-conditioning inside the van can’t quite keep up with the heat, and we’re both covered with a film of sweat.
“So this Amalia – you still in touch with her?”
Emma shakes her head. “Never saw her again. Right about then is when the cops came and they cordoned off the tent with police tape. I wanted to stay there – I was still thinking the boys might show up – but they took me down to headquarters. They started questioning all the other people in the park, too; they blocked the exits. Amalia and her guy Bertrand – they were illegals, you know. She worked in the Comfort Inn. He was a roofer. Lots of people like that live in the parks. You know – the working poor. Campsites are way cheaper than rent. Anyway, Bertie and Amalia – they sure didn’t want to talk to the police. Amalia just clammed up. Didn’t see anything, hear anything, know anything. When the police came back to her about those dimes, because I mentioned it – and this was, like a week later – Amalia and Bertie were long gone.”
“So you never found out what she was talking about?”
“Well, I found out it was some kind of curse – which I’d already figured from the way Amalia acted. But that was about it.”
“She told you not to move them, not to even touch them?”
“Right.”
“The police seized the bowl of water from my house. And the dimes. As evidence.”
“Oh, me, too. In fact, they just about destroyed everything in my tent – including the tent – testing for blood and all. You should see what I got back when they finally returned my worldly possessions. They made a list, you know, when they took it all. I guess they have to.”
“The search warrant inventory.”
“Right, yeah – that. Well, some of the things I didn’t get back at all. It was marked down on the list: tested to destruction.” She makes little quotation marks in the air, then shakes her head. “The dimes were in a little baggie. I threw them in the ocean, afterward, you know, when I got the boys back. One by one.”
I take over the window while she goes outside to sign out two beach umbrellas. I sell two ice-cream sandwiches and a rocket pop.
“I don’t get the voodoo connection,” I tell her. “The guy who took my kids is white.”
“That’s what my boys said – the guy wasn’t black. I couldn’t really figure it out, either. One of the detectives told me they were thinking maybe it was a child-kidnapping ring.”
“Emma?”
“Please try to call me Susie.”
“I’m sorry. Susie?”
She’s sitting on the stool, her legs crossed, swinging a leg from which one flip-flop dangles. I notice that her toenails are painted five different pastel colors, like tiny jelly beans.
“Can I talk to the boys?”
“Oh, Jeez,” she says. “I knew it would get down to this.”
“I just think maybe there’s something – I don’t even know what – but something they know that might help me.”
She sighs. “I just don’t want to revive it all, you know? What if they tell you something and you want to tell the police? And then the police question them again – and it leaks out.” She sighs again. “I really don’t want to move and have to start all over again.” She tilts her head back and stares at the ceiling. Behind the roar of the generator, the wind kicks up outside. A spray of sand ticks against the van. Above us, the balloon-rabbit snaps against the guy wires. When Emma looks back at me, I see the glitter of tears.
“I guess I shouldn’t ask.”
“How can you not ask?” she says. “I know that.” She balls up her hands and rubs at her eyes with her knuckles, like a child. She takes a deep breath and fills her cheeks with air, like a cartoon depiction of the North Wind – then exhales, all at once, a tiny explosion. Compassion finally overwhelms her instinct for self-preservation. “Okay,” she says, pressing her eyes shut as she says it, as if she doesn’t want to witness her own assent.
Emma sets the ground rules and makes me swear “on my children” that I will adhere to them. I will call the boys by the Florida names (Kai and Brandon). I won’t press them too hard if they don’t seem to want to answer. The session can last only fifteen minutes and whatever they say is for me only. And so on. It amazes me that after all she’s been through, she still places so much value on someone’s word.
We meet the following night. My first sight of Kai and Brandon almost takes my breath away. It’s not that they look like my boys. They don’t. But they share the habits of twinship, the way they look at each other, play off each other, interrupt one another, finish each other’s sentences, check to the other with their eyes for assurance in the midst of speaking.
I’m braced for a horror story, but what they tell me is almost reassuring.
“Where were you?” I ask them, first of all, looking from one to the other. “What was the place like?”
“It was a big house.” Brandon looks at his brother, who gives him a little nod.
“Really big.”
“With a humongous lawn.”
“Lotsa trees. Like in a forest.”
“What kind of trees?”
Kai looks at Brandon and shrugs. “I think pine?”
“Yeah,” Brandon agrees, looking at his mother. “Like in the Grand Tetons.”
“We stayed there for a couple of months,” Emma explains. “I worked in Jackson at a restaurant.”
“They had buffalo burgers,” Kai says, knotting up his face in disgust. “Gross.”
“Were there other people there, at this big house, I mean – mowing the lawn or doing the chores – or just the man who took you into his car at the McDonald’s?”
“Just him. I mean there were other people sometimes, but we couldn’t meet them. We had to stay in the big room. Doc told us.”
Doc. I don’t like the sound of that. Doctor Mengele. Papa Doc. Baby Doc.
“But we didn’t have to be quiet or nothing.”
“Or anything,” Emma corrects.
“Or anything. We could play Nintendo even.”
“Why couldn’t you meet anyone?”
“’Cause they might tell, and then Mommy” – he shoots a look at Emma – “might get into trouble and we’d never see her again.”
“When the man approached them at McDonald’s,” Emma explains, “he told them that he was a friend of mine, that I had to go back into treatment, that I couldn’t stand the idea of telling the boys-”
“Doc told us she had a relapse,” Brandon says.
“He told the guys it would break my heart to say good-bye,” Emma explains. “He said I was staying in the ladies’ room until they left. He told them I’d come for them as soon as I was better. But if anyone knew they were staying with him, he wasn’t authorized – so they’d have to go back into foster care and child services would never let them live with me.”
“Ever again,” Kai says in an earnest voice. “That’s what he told us.”
“Now we have a code,” Brandon elaborates, “so we know if it’s true from Mommy or not.”
“Don’t tell him!” Kai warns.
Brandon glares at his brother, then turns to me with an apologetic smile. “We can’t tell anyone or someone might find out and then they could trick us.”
“That’s a good plan.” I can feel my fifteen minutes ticking away. “So what did you do all day? Play Nintendo? Watch TV?”
“Nuh-uh. No TV. We played Nintendo a lot. And Ping-Pong.”
“Uno and Yahtzee, too.”
“Mostly we did training.”
“Training?” I look from one to the other. “Like what?”
“Exercises,” Kai says, and begins to list them in a kind of singsong rhythm as he counts them off on his fingers. “Push-ups, sit-ups, stretching, gymnastics-”